There are many commercial engineering operations as well as many laboratory operations that produce suspensions of ultrafine solids in a liquid medium where the solid particles are very small and impart slow settling characteristics to the suspension. Such systems may be termed colloidal suspensions and frequently are called slimes in mining operations. A typical example of the latter is the by-product produced from mining phosphates in Florida for use in producing fertilizers, phosphoric acid, or other phosphorous compositions. The phosphate occurs naturally with clays and after treatment to recover as much of the phosphate as possible, there is usually a byproduct slime containing 2-6 percent solid material and the remainder water. The solids will not settle in any reasonable length of time to permit recovery of the water or of the solids which often contain significant amounts of valuable minerals. Many methods have been suggested for separating the liquid from the solids in such suspensions or slimes, among which are flocculation followed by precipitation or filtration, evaporation, centrifugation, freezing and thawing, and treatment with polyelectrolytes followed by precipitation. While these procedures may provide some advantages in effecting a separation they each have certain disadvantages which restrict the process to particular applications or which cause the process to be too expensive for general use.